Acknowledgements:

Members of the Media Present;

Kenya Power Management;

Ladies and Gentlemen, Good morning.

The report by The Standard Newspaper March 19, 2017, Business Section Page 26 authored by Paul Wafula, titled “Lying to the President: How Kenya Power Managers Cooked Last Mile Connection Figures”

The above article is based on an alleged interim internal Report on connectivity. However, the interim report is on Zero Vend and not Connectivity. Zero vend refers to prepaid meters installed but have not yet purchased tokens or vended.

The article erroneously concluded that zero vend pre-paid meters is the same as non- connection. Indeed, the 940,668 customers claimed in the article are connected with power supply, but they have not vended for some time.

We wish to state the following;

All Pre-Paid meters come with pre-loaded units.

Our Interim Report identified the following as some of the reasons for Zero vend;

Most of the customers who were beneficiaries of GBOPA and Last Mile Connectivity were largely from informal settlements whose monthly consumption is quite low. As a result, most of them take several months to exhaust the initial pre-loaded units.

Recent rapid development of the property sector due to growing demand for housing has seen installation of prepaid meters even before full occupation of the houses. Also in the leased housing units, movement of tenants at various times occurs. This has resulted in a number of installed pre-paid meters not vending for the period of non-occupancy.

Illegal connections and bypassing of our meters has seen a number of pre-paid meters not vending.

We are undertaking the following remedial measures to manage the zero vends;

Immediately upon connection, customers are required to load tokens to be able to have power.

The company is actively engaging communities on the benefits of legal and safe connections and where this fails, we are prosecuting those who have illegal connections and have bypassed the meters.

We reiterate that the article was erroneous, as zero vending of prepaid meters is not the same as no connection. Indeed the number of connected customers is accurately captures on a daily basis as validated by ICS system. KPLC has therefore not lied to GoK as reported in the article.

Kenya Power operates a centralized system that can be interrogated to confirm the number of customers connected to-date.

We confirm that the number of households connected to the national grid stands at 5.98 million which is equivalent to about 63% of national coverage. We target to connect 70% by the end of this year and universal access by the year 2020.